Delta singing new tune about its Song affiliate

Delta Air Lines Inc. is starting to sing a long, slow farewell to its Song discount affiliate, but officials are promising they won't be dropping any Song routes out of Boston's Logan International Airport or other cities.

As Delta begins a six-month process of folding Song back into the mainline carrier, conventional Delta jets will begin to displace Song's Boeing 757s that feature leather seats and seat-back televisions on Boston-Florida routes. By autumn, Delta will reallocate the 48 Song jets to cross-country routes and refit the now one-class Song planes with a separate first-class cabin, Song chief marketing officer Tim Mapes said in an interview.

Although Delta officials insist they will find ways to incorporate "the best of Song" in improving conventional Delta service, the demise of Song represents to many industry analysts the latest failure of a legacy carrier to successfully launch a discount unit.

Song started in April 2003 as Delta's second effort at launching a low-fare affiliate after Delta Express, which lasted from only 1996 to 2001. In the wake of other failed ventures like Continental Lite in the 1990s and US Airways' MetroJet, United Airlines' Ted unit will by next month be the only surviving example of an airline set up by an old-line carrier to compete with discounters like Southwest Airlines Co. and JetBlue Airways Corp. (US Airways wound up merging with discounter America West to emerge from bankruptcy protection last September, and the combined company has tried to portray itself as a new low-cost carrier, even adopting "LCC" as its stock market ticker symbol.)

"The legacy carriers have been singularly unsuccessful" in trying to create true low-cost airlines, said Allen Michel, a Boston University School of Management professor who has studied and written about the aviation industry. "It's very difficult to make two organizations operate independently and successfully within the same umbrella."

United has bristled at widespread industry skepticism of the Ted operation, which flies from Chicago and Dulles International Airport, outside Washington, D.C., to Florida and the Caribbean, and operates several southwestern routes. In a recent speech United chief executive Glenn F. Tilton called Ted "a success story" and a moneymaker that is being expanded by 20 percent to 56 airplanes this year.

But Hugo Burge, head of U.S. operations for travel Web site cheapflights.com, said, "Certainly if Ted were a big success, it would be growing like a rash" to other cities, including Boston.